Monday, February 25, 2008

I spent the weekend in Worthing – meeting up with Lisa and George as well as Lisa’s parents, Sam and Dyke who was over for the weekend – for a thai meal out.

For the first time, we tried out our new babysitting service- “Sitters”. It’s great. You can book by email and what’s great is they’ll contact a local babysitter in your area – so we can get a babysitter in Worthing just as easily as we can at home! So we can have a night out while we’re on holiday – even in a hotel – Great!

Seemed to work fine (although George did require me to stay behind to settle him for a few minutes).

The following day, Sally Arrived with her children, so everything became a little chaotic. We went down to the seafront to play in Worthing’s arcade on the pier – one of those places where 20p can last an hour.

Later, Anne – a friend of the family joined us and put her scouting experience to full use training the children (and some of the adults) to play hand bells. She was, of course, well prepared with bells at every pitch, a flip chart and a series of ready written out songs. She even had a conducting stick.

It was a disciplined affair, but the children responded amazingly well to it. I’ve never seen such a harmonious bed-time for the four boys!

The house was full, so we stayed over in the Chatsworth – the hotel we had our wedding reception in. George decided to cry uncontrollably from 2 until 5 and then only go to sleep on the condition that I stayed awake and stuck my finger in his mouth.

Not a good night and something’s definitely bothering him. He’s teething I think – and he can’t be comforted.

Sally gave us some advice on this on Sunday and said it takes a few days that we just have to get through…. Well we’ll see.

Kieran also gave some good advice – that when he was teething he bit his dad hard enough to draw blood. Kieran is great with George and looks after him whenever he gets the opportunity. I’m happy to let him since he’s got three younger brothers and his dad has been away with the army a lot – so Kieran probably has more experience looking after children than I have.

We managed to skype Lucinda, Giancarlo and Livia – it’s great to have a video link-up so we could introduce George and Livia!

On Sunday we had a relaxed breakfast at the hotel (although Dyke had to leave at 7am for the airport). The hotel did manage to be a bit crap for me as a vegetarian – they produced a vegetarian cooked breakfast that was exactly the same as the meat one but without the meat! - no vegy sausages I can cope with – but you need to add something else to compensate – not just a big gap at the side of the plate.

Anyway it was Lisa’s Mum’s birthday and we’d booked her into a posh tea room in Brighton. When we got there, they were closed despite the booking so we ended up coming back to Worthing for tea….

We had a big lunch with all the kids during which we took Ethan through his English homework trying to explain that when they wanted words with the suffix “able”, table wouldn’t cover it….

some of the questions I'm grappling with... read on if you want to find out how I cope:

I'm a freelance writer, illustrator and animator, and having just finished my first documentary (on the evolution of sharks) I've now started work on my second (on interstellar travel)... if you want to see how I get on, read on.